Saturday, 3 October 2015

The Agent, the Author, and their Passion

I previously wrote about how I am submitting Eugenica
to literary agents and so it should come as no surprise to discover that I have
had my first rejection; well a few of them actually. Rejection is to be expected
in the literary world, it happens to practically everyone including the most
successful of writers. Armed with this knowledge and previous experience of
submitting by books The War Wolf and For Rapture of Ravens I feel
reasonably armoured against the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune.

Actually of the very few rejections that I have received for
Eugenica most have been concise and in the form a ‘thanks but no thanks’
and a couple have encouraged me to keep on trying. One I received very recently
struck me quite forcibly however. I was thanked for making my submission but as
the agent had to feel passionate about their work they did not
feel that they could take my book on.

Passionate?!

A literary agent has to feel passionate about a book before
they take it on? Right. Okay, I understand that feeling passionate about your
work generally means that you are in the right job for you. People who feel
passionate about what they do generally work harder and longer and go that
extra mile. That is a good thing. In fact to have such a literary agent would
probably increase the chances of an author’s success – and here comes the
inevitable but!

But!

What about the author? What about the passion felt by the
writer for their work? In my case it is my passion that drove me to spend over
a year researching a contentious subject, dredging up my own experiences of
being a subject of medical science, of writing and re-writing and editing and
compiling and all the other aspects of writing that most readers do not even
know goes on. I feel passionate about the story that is encompassed in Eugenica,
that passion is one of the driving forces that has gotten me to the end of the
project. It is the same passion that is going to drive me beyond the actual
writing when the manuscript is finished, polished and submitted for publishing
– probably on Kindle – and I need to start the publicizing of the book. There
is still a lot work to be done and then, because I am passionate about what I
do, I will start of my next novel.

You may be thinking at this point that I am just having a
whinge, just a sorry little complaint about how unfair life is but actually I
am not. The literary agent is, to all intents and purposes, a facilitator. They
represent the writer to publishers and if they have a reputation then they can
secure a publishing contract in most instances. They are necessary because
publishers rarely go looking for new authors themselves. They exist to make
money by getting authors published with hopefully the same success as enjoyed
by J. K. Rowling, who also experienced several rejections in her time. If a
literary agent feels passionate about what they are doing then that is good but
it is a different kind of passion to that which inspires a writer.

Writing is difficult and good writing even more so. There
are hacks and there are authors. The hack writes for money and does not care
about what they produce. The author, and here I am dependent upon my own
motivations, writes because they have a story to tell. The quality of the end
product is important. The response of the reader is important. The feeling of
having created something worthwhile is very important. A good author weaves
their passion into their story. Many readers can perceive within the text the
author’s commitment to what they have written.

When it comes to submitting a manuscript to a literary agent
the author’s passion for his work is not required to be demonstrated. What they
want is a covering letter giving a brief portrait of the author, a synopsis of
the book of varying length between 1 to 2 pages depending on the agent’s whim,
and the first 3 chapters.

Now I said that a good author weaves their passion into
their story so it might be considered reasonably to expect that it would
surface somewhere in the submission material would it not? Well, to a degree. A
novel is a big work, on average 70,000 words; Eugenica is approximately
160,000 words. Irrespective of the length a story is not linear, that is, it
does not flow at the same pace throughout its telling. There are emotional
highs and lows, tension is developed, twists are introduced, characters
develop, themes arise, conflicts resolved, ideas explored, and the various
strands of the plot woven together for the climactic conclusion. If all this
happened in the first 3 chapters then it would be a very short book!

As people we do not express our passion for something in one
continuous gushing outpouring of emotion and activity; it would leave us
drained very quickly. Similarly an author’s passion for their work is not
maintained at a single level throughout the story that they are telling. This
is because the book as a finished article cannot possibly contain all of the
passion that went into its creation. There is passion also in the more mundane
aspects of writing, in the stylesheet, the back-stories of the key characters,
the research, the copious notes, the illustrations (something that I do), the
workbook that contains key dates, observations, notes, the timeline, the first
draft, and so much more flotsam and jetsam, the long hours spent alone, the
missed meals and drinks because you are working on a key point or simply so
lost in the world that you have created that you do not notice the day passing
by. None of this is seen by the literary agent who passionately turns up for
work in office hours and then goes home again.

I know that there are practical obstacles to literary agents
finding good authors as they are, apparently, swamped by submissions, however,
if passion is to be a criteria for the agent taking on a book then should it
not also be one for considering the author? Being a reader as well as a writer
I know when a book has been written by someone who has a feel for their subject
matter. There is a depth to a book that is written by someone who is motivated
to inspire a reaction from their reader and a shallowness to a text that was
written just for the sake of writing something. Perhaps if a literary agent
wants to be passionate about a book before they take it on to sell to
publishers they should take the time to discover just how passionate the author
is about their work, something that I think cannot be captured in a brief
covering letter, an even briefer synopsis and rarely in the first 3 chapters.